Search This Blog

Monday, 23 July 2012

The week just passed I have been teaching Learning Tree course 2108 SQL Server 2012 Database Administration in London. It was great week and the attendees both in-class and online seemed to really enjoy the course. We had some great questions and requests and some of these will make it into some future blog posts

Training aside though it was interesting to be in London. About two weeks or so before the Olympics starts. The day I travelled up I think some athletes started moving into the Olympic village, there was some bad publicity around the security contractor company not quite getting its preparation right. In fairness (to the organisers) when you organise and event of this magnitude, you will run into problems and as long as you deal with them and put things right there is no need for this to have a negative impact on the event. There is no doubt the excitement for the Olympics is building, especially in and around central London.

The hotel I was staying was completely sold out and will remain full for the next three weeks or so. Speaking to some of the staff it seems they are hosting guests from the international media. Some of which has arrived already. I bumped into a lot of officials all kitted out in Olympic uniform.

Outside the LEC on Eversholt Street, just up the street from the entrance to Euston station, Usain Bolts stride pattern from 100m world recording breaking race in Beijing had been painted on the pavement. It showed his starting position, and how his stride grew in length as he got up to his top speed. His stride was almost 2m in length when he was in full flow and it showed where his nearest competitor was when he crossed the line in 9.69 seconds. They were a long way behind. I wonder if he will win by such a margin in London?

The excitement is building no doubt there will be many world records broken over the next few weeks and I’m looking forward to it.

The photo below shows Usain Bolt’s starting position in the Beijing 2008 100 final race.

Friday, 13 July 2012

I bought a USB hard disk recently that I wanted to use to backup some VMware Workstation and some Hyper-V virtual machines for a project I’m working on.

I’m running VMware Workstation on my host and a Hyper-V server on a VM inside my VMware Workstation. There will be another post on how to do this shortly, but for now I wanted to share an interesting little problem I ran into.

I mounted my USB hard drive inside my VMware Workstation VM that was running Hyper-V and I tried to export one of my Hyper-V VM’s direct to my USB drive. I got error saying ‘Not enough space at the destination for the source file’ I had difficulty understanding why I was getting this error. My VM file was around 7.7GB and the free space on my hard disk was 495GB. This didn’t make much sense to me.

A quick Google search and it became clear that my problem was to do the file system on my USB hard disk. FAT32 file system can only cope with files of 4GB or less in size. My USB drive was a FAT32 file system. I formatted the drive to make it NTFS(Caution: this will wipe all data off the drive!), fortunately for me there was no data on the drive, so I had no data to lose on the drive and tried my Hyper-V Export again and the export worked perfectly.